Sunday, July 8, 2012

Git holes

(title thanks to Skipper).

This week's post is a bit different but still relevant to GSOC. Coming into GSOC I had no idea what GIt, Github or even what version control meant. Now, I can still still say I don't know what they are, but I can say I have learned how (not) to use them.

I think the key to learning Git is creating a repository and trying out as many git commands as possible and seeing what they do first hand. This was especially helpful for me because I was unfamiliar with the lingo and often I found the documentation very difficult to grasp for someone new to git.

From my minimal experience, anybody trying to learn git should create their own repo and make multiple branches, push commits, pull from remote repositories, cherry-pick, add and delete files and be familiar with the commands that make use of a remote repository and the ones that remain local. 2 Hours of tinkering for me provided more insight than days of reading documentation.